Almost everything about catholic faith revolves around events that (allegedly) happened in the Middle East. Most of the holiest sites seem to be there in relation to the bible’s depiction of events. So wouldn’t it make sense that the pope/vatican would place its power center as near as possible from the holiest sites? How did it come to be Rome? Was this a decision based on the current political climate at the time or was there a reason based on faith/rethoric of the church?
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Because the Catholic church was based in the holy see in Rome. The other early Christian power centers were in Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch (modern Turkey, Egypt and Syria). So as you can see they were mainly in the middle east while Rome was the westernmost one.
They split into different churches due to politics, isolation due to the empire splitting up, and disagreement on how to interpret the Christian sources and the nature of Christ and the trinity.
It’s worth pointing out that Early Christianity *was* initially centered on Jerusalem, but Judea was devastated by revolts against Rome. After the Bar Kokhba Revolt, Hadrian rebuilt the ruined city as Aelia Capitolina and banned Jews—including Jewish Christians—from it for all but one day a year (Tisha B’Av).
Isn’t there also some reasoning based on the traditional title of Roman emperors as “Pontifex Maximus?” They held the position as head priest of the Roman religion, and when that religion shifted to Christianity, they kept the title and position. To this day the term “Supreme Pontiff” refers to the pope.
More or less for the same reason of my friend, that was born in Rome and now lives in London: more peolple, more wealth, more power, more opportunities.
The mediterrean sea was the major commercial route at the time, and rome lies straight up in the middle of it… Very good if you want to be friends with everyone from england to egypt.
Plus many other contrubuting factors.
You can’t rule out that ancuent romans were not very religions, it was probably easyer to convert them than jews, that notoriusly have a very strong religious identity (plus there were many more of them).
The Catholic Church is an institution that emerged within the Roman Empire. It borrowed much of its organizational structure (like dioceses) from Rome. It received patronage from the Emperor (after 313). It was created to provide services to Christians across the Roman Empire, so from an institutional perspective, it made more sense to set up the power center of the church close to the political heart of the Empire. That would allow the church to have better access to Roman roads, maritime links, communications networks, and sources of funding and political support. Jerusalem may have been the foundational city of Christianity, but for an organization meant to represent Christians across the Empire, it was simply too irrelevant and remote.
Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople were also major power centers of the early church and were located closer to the Middle East, but Rome was able to bolster its prestige and independence as the Western Roman Empire collapsed to become the de facto leader of the church. Alexandria and Antioch were then conquered by the Islamic Caliphate in the 7th Century, and the church in Constantinople would eventually break off as the Eastern Orthodox Church when the Bishop of Rome grew more powerful and tried to assert his supremacy (to greatly oversimplify). Rome remains the power center of the Catholic Church to this day, while the other churches have their own power centers.
Because the Muslims mostly took control of the Middle East and also banned/killed/drove most of them out ?
This is actually two questions. One of them is “why Rome?” And the other is “why not the Middle East?”
Why not in the Middle East is easy. The Catholic Church is the Western branch of Christendom. They are defined by being in the west. If you want the branch of Christendom that exists in the Middle East, you want the Othodox Church. These two groups used to be one, but because of political and cultural and geographic differences, they split up.
So why Rome? Well, the current political climate, but that’s because “political climate” is connected to everything else. Rome had ties to Israel, was stable and affluent, and had religious and theological reasons for its significance.
Israel was a “client kingdom” of Rome. Rome had conquered it and left a puppet monarch in charge. Israel’s religion was uniquely incompatible with the Roman pantheon because Israel came into being as a nation that violently refuted ALL other religions. And religion permeated every part of cultural and political life at that point. Israel was destabilized by Rome because too many factions within Israel refused to submit to Roman rule, and collapsed shortly after the writing of most of the texts in the New Testament. The urgency and pronouncements of coming doom that you see in the Gospels, the Book of Revelation, and other texts in the New Testament come from living in a time when the whole system was on the verge of coming down.
The traditional form of Judaism collapsed along with the destruction of their holy sites. There was a loss of community, language, and culture as the people of Israel dispersed. So the actual origins of the Christian tradition were in a location where you weren’t going to end up with a stable, powerful center for your new religion.
However, the first and second generations of Christian evangelist/missionaries successfully sold their religion to lots of people at the center of the conquering empire. At the beginning, most of those people were not important/powerful/influential. But the religion grew, to a point at which the Roman emperor Constantine recognized Christianity as something that could be a problem for him or a tool for him. He chose to make Christianity work for him, and made it the state religion.
That’s the political side. The religious side is that the most influential person in Christianity, Paul, made it to Rome to evangelize and was, tradition has it, executed there. Even more theologically important, Peter, one of the most heavily featured disciples in the Gospels, is also traditionally held to have made it as far as Rome before being executed. The Catholic Church stakes *all* of its religious authority on a connection to Peter.
With the two most important Christian figures after Jesus pressing into enemy territory and dying there, placing your seat of power in that location is a theological statement about your good religion triumphing over an evil empire. It echoes and reinforces the Christian teaching that Jesus was executed under Roman rule and rose to life again.
But remember that the Catholic Church is only half of the original extent of Christendom. The various branches of the Orthodox church also have their own holy sites, likewise based upon important religious figures and the political situation of the past. Rome is a holy site for them, sure, but their own locations are also holy. The Catholic Church is centralized and unified under one seat of power, but the pope of Rome is only one of many popes who all recognize each other’s authority.
OK, I would break down the answer slightly differently.
Firstly, a lot of people here seem to think that the power of Roman branch of Christianity is a recent development. It is not, as it is evident from Acts and letters; most of them seem to indicate that the Roman branch of the church rose to prominence very early, perhaps due to personal qualities of St. Paul. What’s more, if we take Acts at their word, then we’ll see that the Jewish community was extremely hostile to early Christians, driving them to form large diasporas elsewhere.
Secondly, early Christianity’s prestige was largely driven by theology, and in order to do theology you needed money and a pool of educated people. Relatively few cities could offer something similar, and by the time of the Great Schism there were only two: Rome and Constantinople.
Thirdly, there’s a big matter of language people often omit. The Gospels are written in original Greek; however, the Roman tradition translated everything into non-native Latin. What’s worse, it started doing theology in Latin too; so, essentially, a lot of the split was about Rome going their way. There was no other region that could pull off something similar (at least, not until Luther).
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